


Smile like you (never) mean it

by Anonymous



Category: Persona 5
Genre: Bad End AU, Bad ending Au, Gen, POV Second Person, Spoilers for Persona 5 Royal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-28
Updated: 2020-06-28
Packaged: 2021-03-04 10:47:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,003
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24968452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: He chose to continue dreaming. You don't have a choice, beyond living with it.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 30
Collections: Anonymous Fics, Fanfic Anonymous





	Smile like you (never) mean it

You can't stand to look at him anymore. 

So you leave. Walk out the door, don't look back, anger burning in your lungs. Screaming will do nothing now. Not when his mind is made up. 

You once asked him if he would throw away everything to be with you. You hadn't thought in the moment how horrible it might be if he kept it. You knew it was a bad idea the second you said it. But you couldn't have predicted this. 

Why would he choose now to be selfish! After a year spent talking to people and listening to their problems, never talking of his own. After working for weapons, volunteering his body as a test subject for medicine, all in the name of changing hearts. After being beat up in an interrogation room and keeping his silence about his friends. After all that, it's you he chose to be selfish over. 

It doesn't even make sense! Why YOU?

You don't deserve his forgiveness. His regard. A second chance. 

You don't want to die, and it's horrible timing to discover that when a cognition wearing your face holds a gun to your head. You hadn't expected to live, but to die by your own hand, to realize you wanted to live so badly it hurt was darkly ironic. It might have almost been amusing if it weren't so personal. 

You don't want to die. But to live like this would be worse. 

It's nice to dream about being ordinary high school students, and being friends, and being cherished. A part of you craves it like the air you breathe, after biking up a long hill. Your lungs burn for it. Maybe if you asked, Maruki could bring back your mom, and you would never have been an orphan, never been hungry, never had anger pumping through your veins alongside blood. You would have been loved, like you wanted, personally. 

You would be a very different person if she hadn't died. Your parents have defined you, marked you with their scars, their vices, their dreams for you. 

You would still be friends with him here, because it makes you both happy, and could introduce him to your mother, and pretend this is how it really happens until you forgot. 

It's an appealing dream. It's tempting in the way things too good to be true are. But you have been someone's puppet before, you recognise the feeling of strings. You do not want to be a puppet again, to let someone else decide your fate. 

You thought he knew that. You thought he understood and respected that about you! You thought he would support you, would resist the temptation, stick to his ideals as he always had! 

You thought you could trust him!

You can't trust anyone. They all want to use you. You knew that. You thought he was the exception. You want to hate him for that, and it's hard, which only makes you angrier. 

You should have known better.

A jailer who thinks he loves you, is still a jailer. A cage is still a cage, no matter how comfortable. A jailer who thinks he loves you, who gives you the attention you crave may be worse, for how easy it may be to delude yourself. 

But you know better. If he loved you, he wouldn't have trapped you, a puppet again, on another man's strings. He wouldn't have strung himself up beside you, and called it being alive. You feel sick at the thought of being a puppet again. Forever this time. 

Being alive is dangerous and terrifying, and only occasionally worth it, but it was  your life. Complete with  your bad life choices and  your consequences. To have it all striped away and become meaningless feels like the worst insult to your struggles. What is a human defined by, if not their deeds and their scars? 

The thieves look happy, with their lives rearranged for their happiness, but also emptier, stripped of their passion, anger, and the meaning they took from their actions. They have lost their drive to do better, to fight for other people's better worlds. They are stagnant in their happiness. 

There's something distinctly inhuman about everyone here. For all you lacked close human connections, you watched and knew well the wide variety of emotions they could express. Everyone is content here, and there is something unnerving about that blanket uniformity. 

The people here feel inhuman, but perhaps it is you who lacks true humanity. You remember dying after all, remember a cognition with your face holding a gun to you. Who is to say that you haven't become a cognition yourself? You? You don't want to be a cognition, that would make you happy, and for that you can't trust it. And there's no one else you can trust to ask. 

You don't want to die, but it would be the better option then living like this. But you know without trying that you won't be allowed to. That would make him unhappy, and any attempts you make wouldn't work because of that. You can't storm this palace alone. Not without any likely result beyond loss of all automoty. 

So what options are left but to smile and pretend, like you always do. Pretend to like it like you pretended to be delighted to be asked stupid questions on interviews.Smile like you smiled at coworkers who hated having a teenager in the workroom who was smarter then them. Smile when you accept a job you hate, suck up to someone you wish to destroy, when you lie to a crowd whose love is conditional. Smile like you smiled to everyone, regardless of how you felt about them. You want to be liked. So you smile. 

He wants to keep you, so he can have you the same way anyone else has. Polite smiles, and empty words, carefully calculated to evoke response, while you wait for the moment. 

You are not willing to be kept. 


End file.
